L.A.’s Nonprofit version of Shark Tank

The second annual Social Innovation Fast Pitch program is well underway, with 22 non-profit entrepreneurs being trained and mentored on how to succinctly and powerfully “tell their story.”  Only 10 will be selected to make their ‘pitch’ at the event in front of hundreds of attendees and compete for up to $20,000 in funding.

The Social Innovation Fast Pitch and Showcase will be held at the University of Southern California on November 11, 2009 from 4:00 pm – 7:30 pm. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.socialinnovationpitch.org

This event, hosted by Los Angeles Social Venture Partners, the Social Enterprise Institute, and the University of Southern California, will recognize and celebrate innovative Los Angeles nonprofits that are solving urgent social problems, and will serve as a catalyst to engage local business and community support.

Fast Pitch!
The highlight of the formal program includes live, three-minute ‘pitches’ from nonprofit leaders selected for the strength of their innovative strategies and results.  A panel of judges will critique the pitches and select grant award winners!

Fireside chat with Andy Rappaport
Investor * Social Entrepreneur * Change Agent
We are pleased to announce Andy Rappaport as our featured speaker.  Andy wants us to think differently when we endeavor to change the world. As a successful venture capitalist and a leading voice for innovation-oriented, risk-seeking philanthropy, Andy believes the most productive giving should start like an experimental investment – one in which early failures are important and where small initial successes can lead to large global changes able to attract larger pools of capital.  In this discussion with Krisztina “Z” Holly, Vice Provost for Innovation at USC, Andy will describe how he has applied lessons learned from the venture capital world to rethinking the social sector. Despite the magnitude of the challenges facing our world, Andy’s philosophy can inspire us to make a big impact with limited resources.

Networking Reception:
Following the formal program, there will be a mixer where attendees can network with one another and learn more about the mission and activities of the presenting organizations.

Ticket Prices:
$50 for early registrations through October 31, 2009
$65 for late and onsite registration after October 31, 2009
Students: Free with Pre-Registration and Accepted Application
Tax-deductible contributions to support the event are also welcome

Please join us for an exciting evening! You can count on being educated, activated and inspired.

Questions?
For registration or other general questions about the program, contact LASVP at 310.281.7509 or info@lasvp.org.
For media inquiries, contact Elisa Wiefel Schreiber at 213.821.6063 or wiefel@stevens.usc.edu.

‘Green’ business grows out of class project

What started as a study in business for some Butler University students has grown into a full-fledged “green” company aimed at taking the stress out of composting.

Back to Earth Compost, the brainchild of junior Conner Burt, started as proposal for a class called Real Business Experience.

“It’s very experiential learning. We use a small-business model that the students actually plan and define themselves,” said program coordinator Dick Halstead. “Those who want to actually go out and run their businesses, which is funded by the university.”

Burt and his partners proposed a central composting location on campus that would be fueled by kitchen scraps and other items picked up weekly from area subscribers.

He said he got the idea while waiting in line for a cup of coffee.

“I realized that in Starbucks they offer biodegradable cups, which is a good idea, but if they go to the same landfill as all of the rest of the trash, the problem really isn’t mitigated,” Burt said.

Back to Earth Compost now occupies space behind Butler’s baseball fields, and is prepared to handle between 20 and 45 households, and possibly some Broad Ripple Restaurants as well.

For $5 a week, customers within five to 10 miles of campus get a bucket to fill with compostable material, which is picked up weekly and its biodegradable liner replaced.

In the spring, the plan is to give those subscribers their contributions back in the form of nutrient-rich soil.

“We’re done our research, and we’ve found that 30 percent of household waste is organic material that can be composted,” Burt said. “We’re trying to provide people who don’t have the time or the space to compost; we’re trying to make it easy for them.”

The company will also be partnering with Butler’s Center for Urban Ecology to work on a pilot study for a fraternity or sorority house composting effort. Ultimately, it could turn into a campus-wide effort.

“We’re just going to take it this semester and see how it goes,” Burt said. “If it goes well, we have some options and maybe another class will take over.”

Back to Earth Compost is expected to officially launch this week. Those in the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood interested in taking part are asked to contact Burt at btecompost@gmail.com or through the company’s Facebook.com fan page.

~Tell them you heard it @ Green Buzz!

Source: Indiana News

Cruise Lines Graded on Environmental Impacts

Millions of Americans take cruise vacations every year. However, most don’t realize that cruising is more harmful to the environment and human health than many other forms of travel. With ships that can carry up to 7,000 passengers and crew, these floating cities pollute the air we breathe and the water we use and enjoy.

All cruise lines are not the same. You can choose a cruise line that is reducing its environmental and human health impacts. To help, Friends of the Earth has put together a Cruise Ship Report Card comparing 10 major cruise lines.

Visit Friends of the Earth to get the green scoop on the dirtiest cruise ships. Check it out BEFORE you book a cruise.

Here’s to cruising in green style!

~Green Buzz

Source: Friends of the Earth

Daryl Hannah’s off-the-grid life

Daryl Hannah brings a personal sweetness and actor’s intensity to the stage of environmentalism, a term she doesn’t like.

Like many environmental terms — green, eco, sustainability, organic – “companies have co-opted and glommed onto these words,” she told an audience in Fort Worth this week. Luckily, she says the public is learning to be more informed.

“People are making ethical choices that help all living things to thrive, not to just sustain,” said the casually dressed actress who has starred in many memorable films such as Splash (with Tom Hanks), Steel Magnolias (with Sally Fields), Roxanne (with Steve Martin) and two Kill Bill movies directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Hannah, who was the headliner for a green event benefiting the Texas Trees Foundation and the North Texas Clean Air Coalition, said that although she has lived off the grid for 20 years, she didn’t speak about it until 9-11.

“It was after 9-11 that I realized we didn’t need to go to war for oil,” she said. “There are other options available and we have the infrastructure to do it now.”

Hannah has two cars – a 1984 El Camino that is powered by vegetable oil from local restaurants and the other, her “Kill Bill Trans-Am” that has been converted to running on alcohol. “I don’t remember the last time I went to a gas station, except to use the restroom,” she said.

“Rudolf Diesel built the original diesel to run on vegetable oil,” she pointed out. “The idea was that farmers could fuel the vehicle with their produce.”

Noting that the Chevy Volt is expected to debut in 12 months, she said the public will have to recognize that their energy may still be coming from dirty, fossil fuels.

“Electric cars are important,” she says, “as long as they are not plugging into the grid. If they are you might as well be burning coal in your home.”

By living off the grid, Hannah has no utility bills. Her home runs on passive and active solar-power and was built using non-toxic and recycled materials. She uses no petroleum products and uses spring water. The Rocky Mountain home, built in the 1800s and snuggled into an insulating  mountain, is no mansion, she says.

“It doesn’t have 19 bathrooms.”

On the outward facing side of the house, solar panels collect and retain energy to power the home, and while a biodiesel generator is available for backup power, Hannah says she hasn’t had to use it. The home is designed so that all the water from the sink, dishwasher and shower – the grey water – is used to water the garden.

A vegetarian since she was 11, Hannah says she believes that not eating meat is the most effective thing a person can do for the environment.

“The meat industry puts out more carbon emissions than the transportation industry,” she says. “Even giving up meat for a weekend, helps.” In her case, she became a vegetarian, because, “ I couldn’t disassociate from the creature on my plate.”

Hannah’s love for all living things is the inspiration for her video blog, DHLovelife.com.

“I was going to do a TV show with the Discovery Channel, but I was suspicious of some of their sponsors.” Instead, she chose to produce videos on her own and not worry about censorship. “I want to focus on solution to the crises that we face,” she says. She writes and shoots most of the vlog herself, with the exception of some of the interviews she conducts with oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle and environmental scientist Dr. David Suzuki.

Hannah sees a three-way solution to global warming: Conserve, renew and offset.

Conserving can be accomplished by buying locally grown food, giving up meat, using a fully loaded washer, air drying clothes, installing CFLs and unplugging small appliances.

By renewing, Hannah suggests buying the new, more energy-efficient large appliances such as refrigerators; insulating hot water heaters; and using public transportation. As for offsetting, she suggests checking out the many websites that can help you calculate how much carbon you are responsible for and then offset it buy purchasing wind power or planting a tree.

Of course, she adds, “It is less important to offset and more important to ask the question: Do I need so much stuff? We need re-evaluate our lifestyles…for our own health and our kids’ future. And we’ll save money in the long run. ” And, she adds, “get the poisons out of your house.” Check to see if the deodorant, makeup, cleaning products you are using are non-toxic and biodegradeable.

Hannnah points out that despite what some may think, something that is carbon neutral isn’t all good. For instance, she points out, a so-called carbon-neutral nuclear plant contains radioactive waste. And while natural gas burns clean, it is still a fossil fuel.
The basic thing, she says, is that “we need clean air, clean water and unpoisoned soil to grow our food. It’s common sense. And it’s not a partisan thing.”

Education is key, she says. As her mentor, aquanaut Sylvia Earle, says, “You can’t care, if you don’t know…Once you know, you don’t go back.”

Hannah recommended several authors to the crowd including William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which talks about making ethical choices that will help all living things to thrive, including all children in all species, for all time. There’s also The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Food should be grown in the ground or on a tree, says Hannah. If it’s processed or packaged, it’s not really food.

Lending her celebrity name to a good cause had gotten Hannah arrested twice. Once, she was arrested in South Central Los Angeles for supporting an urban garden that was being threatened by a developer (the garden was subsequently razed). In June, she protested mountaintop removal mining alongwith NASA climate scientist James Hansen.

“Civil disobedience is a useful tool when something’s not right. It brings awareness and supports a struggle. A recognizeable name can help, “ she admits. “When I got arrested in West Virginia, the police were very respectful…they all wanted their picture taken with me,” she said with a grin.

Although making movies are still part of Hannah’s life, she says, “more of my time and energy is being spent on educating ourselves. There are solutions.” She notes that people around the world look to the American Dream subscribing to the concept that “big is better.”

“ I think we can redefine the American Dream as beautiful, well-made, but keep it simple and essential without excess.”

Hannah’s Camino is a good example. It’s hardly the luxury vehicle of a movie star. But it gets 40 miles to the gallon and its fuel has virtually no toxicity (about the same as table salt). She demonstrates this in one of her DHLoveslife videos by actually pouring a glass of grease fuel and taking a drink.

Hannah is an actor who has become immersed in her environmental role and doesn’t just talk the talk. But drinking grease fuel? “I really did that,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

Source: Green Right Now / By Harriet Blake

Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution (1914-2009)

With all these recent celebrity deaths, it’s pretty lame of us media types that we haven’t given more press/public attention to a real hero that has passed away. While Patrick Swayze may have made a lot of great films and seemed like a nice guy, and Michael Jackson was the King of Pop and an amazing entertainer, Norman Borlaug was a true hero that saved hundreds of millions of people’s lives. Borlaug, dubbed the “Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived” by Penn and Teller, died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in his Dallas home on Saturday, September 12.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Borlaug was also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. He has also been credited with saving more lives than ANYONE that has ever lived. Why? Because he helped to develop a high-yielding, short-straw wheat variety that was more resilient than any other wheat out there. This meant that millions of people in Mexico, India and Pakistan were saved from eminent starvation with the development of this new wheat. Crops were established and hundreds of millions of people projected to be starving to death by the 1980s were saved. Since its creation, the dwarf wheat he helped create has been planted in crops in six Latin American countries, six in the Near and Middle East, and several countries in Africa and helped save millions more from famine.

“There are 800 million hungry people on earth, as many as 400 million in Asia alone,” Borlaug said at the IARI Auditorium at New Delhi on March 16 2005. He went on to say, “We will have to double the world food supply by 2050,” a feat he saw as improbable with our current agricultural resources and means.

Still actively pursuing his dreams to end world hunger through biotechnology well into his 90s, this amazing man was still the president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, an sister organization of the Carter Center and whose goal is to test and promote higher-yielding technology for maize, wheat, rice, grain legumes, and roots and tubers to help feed African nations, up until this year. And he was also still teaching at Texas A&M with a center there named after him, the Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement.. He also has numerous other research centers across the world in Bolivia, the UK, and the US standing in his name. Borlaug is immortalized within a stained glass window called the “World Peace Window” at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is survived by his two children, his grandkids and more than a pair of great grandkids.

It says something as a country and as a society when we give more press to someone who entertains than who helps actually save lives. I’m not saying we shouldn’t mourn Swayze’s or Jackson’s deaths, far from it, I was totally struck when I heard about MJ dying and even a bit sad about Swayze. But to have SUCH little press out there about this true global hero’s death is just down right despicable when every other image on TV, like CNN, is still about MJ and now Swayze (and yes Kennedy too but that’s a whole other ball of wax) and there’s a mere two-second blip about Borlaug. Sad. The man deserves a great tribute and he should be plastered all over the TV screens as well as all the dailies.

This man has done so much to help our world and the human race it’s impossible for me to have time to relate it all right now. Here are some more credible places to read about this amazing individual: New York Times, and Forbes

Source: The Boston Phoenix

B Corporations: Giving Business a Soul

There are some new kids on the block and they’re called B Corporations.

B Corporations are radically different from traditional companies because they allow socially motivated entrepreneurs to embed social responsibility into the DNA of their business.

By requiring directors to at least consider the impact of their decisions not only on shareholders, but also on employees, suppliers, community and the environment, social entrepreneurs can structure their business model to minimize their carbon footprint and maximize their investment.

If it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. Someone is actually taking the big environmental picture and breaking it down into bite size pieces, at least where business is concerned.

The effect is profound. The B structure helps companies maintain their social mission on a day-to-day basis as well as when they go through management changes and investment offers.

Let’s face it: business drives the economy and the quality of our communities. The current economic crisis is proof that ‘business as usual’ is dead. Old methods of conducting business must change if we are going to rebuild our economy, which means there is a gigantic opportunity to create new methods of doing business. It’s a new day and we need a new economic standard.

Enter B Corporations.

B Corporations are the brainchild of founders Jay Coen Gilbert, Bart Houlahan and Andrew Kassoy. It’s part of an ambitious effort designed to use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. And Kassoy knows a thing or two about the power of business – in his past professional life, he helped manage billions of dollars for computer magnate Michael Dell.

According to co-founder Bart Houlahan, B Corporations stand on a three-legged stool. Leg one is standards. Leg two is legal. Leg three is the brand.

B Corp certification is managed by B Lab – a nonprofit headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. In order to earn the right to use the certified B Corp Seal, first a business has to score 80 points on the 200-point B Ratings System, which relates to the company’s social and environmental performance. Second, they have to agree to amend their corporate governing documents to hold directors accountable to stakeholders.

Certification is online; it’s transparent; and anyone can do it.

Hardik Savalia, one of B Lab’s associates, says that B Corp Certification differentiates companies ‘walking the talk’ from companies claiming to be green or socially responsible. This isn’t just good news for consumers, but also investors and policymakers who want to support ‘responsible businesses’ but don’t know how to identify them.

“Our space has done some great work in the past thirty years to set product specific standards and reporting principles. And we now have an opportunity to create common standards and ratings looking at the whole business,” said Savalia.

Currently, B Corp Certification is just that: certification. But their work is more of an infrastructure play than anything else. Already, B Lab is laying the foundation for states such as California to say: we need to legally recognize and support these mission-driven corporations.

According to Savalia, there are three states actively pursuing legislation for a new corporate form: California, Colorado and Vermont. Four other states have begun similar conversations: Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington.

As far as nonprofit organizations, B Corporations can provide a way for nonprofits to live out the values they believe in. Case in point: Greyston Bakery.

The Greyston Bakery is a $6.5 million for-profit enterprise started and owned by the non-profit Greyston Foundation that has been producing brownies, cakes and tarts for twenty-five years. (They produce all the brownies for Ben & Jerry’s line of ice cream.)

The bakery hires and trains men and women who have little or no credentialed work experience, many of whom have come to Greyston with backgrounds that include homelessness, incarceration, substance abuse, welfare dependence, domestic violence and illiteracy. All of its profits go to The Greyston Foundation, which operates several intensive self-sufficiency programs in Yonkers, New York.

So who else is a B Corp? Presently, there are 215 B corporations in the U.S. & Canada, 65 of which are operating in California, and eight of which are based in Los Angeles.

If you cruise over to the B Corporation website, you’ll find a B Community and Find a B directory. Just plug in your city or other keywords and certified B companies will pop up.

If the economic crisis has shown us anything, it’s that business needs a soul. At B Lab, the question becomes how do we help entrepreneurs maintain the soul of their companies over time.

For more info: B Lab, 8 Walnut Ave., Berwyn, PA 19312, Phone (610) 296-8283

Source: Joleen Deatherage, LA Nonprofit Business Columnist at Examiner.com

To view the original article, visit LA Nonprofit Business Examiner.

Future car: A magnet-powered hamster wheel?

Cruisin' in magnetic style

Magnets very rarely come up in serious renewable energy discussions. But why? It doesn’t get more zero-emission than that! At least that’s the thought behind car designer Harsha Vardhan’s new Transporter TW: an electric vehicle propelled by magnetic fields.

The single-passenger car is technically electric — just like the Tesla Roadster or the impending Chevy Volt — but its electric engine drives magnetic fields instead of tires. Now why would that be advantageous — besides looking exactly as futuristic as people in the 80s thought things would? Apparently, according to Vardhan, the resulting ride would be whisper-quiet, incredibly smooth, and of course completely green.

The two gigantic wheels pictured above are actually filled with superconducting fluid, generating constantly-shifting magnetic fields that work to turn the wheels. They rotate around a small back-entry cockpit, complete with swivel chair and steering mechanism that looks like you could jump to hyperspeed at any moment.

A lot of people grumble when they see concept cars like this, thinking they’re a waste of time when there’s no way they’ll ever hit the road. But it seems like magnetic technology could be adapted to further electric vehicle innovations that have a chance of making it to market — clever Star Wars jokes aside.

To read the original article, visit Green Beat.

Oakland collision repair shop says ‘green marketing’ works

As more collision repair shops convert to waterborne paint, upgrade to energy-efficient equipment and lighting, and look for other ways to make their shops more efficient, reduce VOC emissions and comply with state and federal environmental regulations, many have begun touting their new “green business” status in their marketing materials.

But what is the value of marketing a shop’s environmental practices to customers, particularly when bottom-line-focused insurance companies drive so much of the collision business? And how can shops let their customers know that their green practices aren’t just puffed up marketing jargon?

Shop owner Jacques Andres first started thinking about his business’s environmental impact after driving home in a newly painted car. Dust and particles from the paint job had lodged in the carpet and interior, making him sick every time he drove it.

“After I drove it for 15 minutes, I’d have a runny nose, watery eyes and swollen glands, almost like I was coming down with the flu,” Andres says. “Through closer inspection of the car I found there was primer dust, sanding dust and paint dust in the rugs and the heating and air vents. I realized there are a lot of processes around hazmat that aren’t really being controlled.”

Not long afterward, he rebranded the body shop side of his Oakland-based Baybridge Motors business as Clean Green Collision in 2004, and redesigned the shop with new collection and filtration systems to reduce emissions. Andres switched to waterborne paints and a UV curing system that eliminates the need for solvents. He also designed a dust filter that recirculates and captures sanding and paint emissions, and added new ceiling dust filters. He also takes care to seal off the windows, doors and ventilation systems in the vehicles his staff repairs to prevent any pollution inside the car.

Clean Green services medium to higher-end clients, and gains most of its business through word-of-mouth or walk-in customers. Environmental marketing doesn’t necessarily bring clients in the door, but Andres says it does make an impact on customers.

“There is support, mostly once customers come in to get an estimate and they see what we’re doing,” Andres says. “It’s a good selling tool at that point.”

Marketing a green shop to high-end customers in California is one thing, but what about other parts of the country where waterborne hasn’t been mandated yet, and customers aren’t necessarily worried about body shop emissions? Shops in other states also have taken a proactive position on waterborne, and hope to use their environmentally friendly shop practices to gain new business.

To read the rest of the original article, click HERE.

Atlanta’s Going Green!

Hey Atlanta, are you interested in participating in your green economy but don’t know where to start? Why not take a class or workshop at the Atlanta Green Expo this weekend to learn more on how YOU can go green!

The Atlanta Green Expo will be held this Saturday, May 30th, 2009 and Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia.  The expo’s mission is to educate individuals, communities, businesses and policy makers on sustainable living through efficient, renewable energy, and the conservation of water and land resources.

The event will be held 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days, and it’s only $5 for adults (free for children).

Check out the classes and workshops being offered! You can’t afford to miss this:

Greening Your Home and Garden:
This track will include workshops that provide products, services and expertise that would be of interest by individuals for use in their homes and gardens. From solar panels and recycled glass countertops for your home to workshops on starting vegetable gardens in your back yard, this track will include a wealth of information for homeowners.

You’ll also learn how to make your yards into more sustainable and fruitful environments. The Atlanta Green Expo will show you how to create beautiful yards and gardens, done in ways that are environmentally friendly. Topics will include composting, conserving water, natural pest abatement and much, much more.

Green Building and Sustainable Development:
Architects, Developers, Builders, City Planners – this is your area! Here you will find seminars dedicated to illustrating the bottom line benefits of “going green” in your planning and development. Working with members of the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), this Track will present the latest trends and available products to help you design and build more LEED certified projects.

Energy, Conservation & Recycling:
The focus of this track is on alternative energy, conservation efforts, and the concept of “refuse, reduce, reuse and recycle”. Attendees can see for themselves the products, services and practices that can help them save energy, conserve resources and save money as well. Energy use is one of the areas with the greatest potential to improve one’s ecological footprint. The main goal for the Atlanta Green Expo classes and workshops is to help us learn how we can start making better choices, by using less energy, moving towards the use of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, and reducing the environmental impacts to our air, water, and land from many of our current practices.

Food & Agriculture:
What’s better – locally grown or organic foods? What are C.S.A.’s? What’s all this talk about “Permaculture”? Come find out about these issues, the state of American agriculture and food production, and how you can help to make it better. A healthy, sustainable lifestyle is driven by choices about food. Making such choices involves answering questions about how our food is grown and how that growing process affects the environment, as well as who grows our food and how far our food travels. The Atlanta Green Expo classes and workshops will offer insights into the importance of how our food choices affect our health, and of discovering ways of raising foods that are less costly to the environment.

Sustainability Education:
What principles should we follow as we make dozens of small decisions each day to reduce our environmental impact? The Atlanta Green Expo seeks to empower families, businesses and communities toward the long-term ideal of sustainability. In addition to having a hands on, educational “Green Kids Zone”, this track consists mostly of Workshops and Seminars in topics ranging from reducing your Carbon Footprint to the importance of Socially Responsible Investing. Here the Expo classes and workshops will illustrate ways in which we can make our lives and our communities more sustainable.

Transportation:
Transportation is one of our society’s largest contributors to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the problems associated with our country’s “addiction to oil”. The Atlanta Green Expo classes will highlight more sustainable options in transportation, and encourage us to find alternate ways to get around instead of continuing to rely on our personal, carbon-based vehicles. Bio-diesel, ethanol and electric vehicles are new technologies that are available today. And there are many under-used, yet “green” methods of transportation that need to be re-emphasized, such as car-pooling, public transit and riding bicycles more often.

Community Action & Involvement:
Come and find out how you can get involved with organizations that promote sustainable practices that affect our community. We will have representatives from religious communities, government, activist and non-profit organizations offering many ways to get involved and to help make a difference! The Atlanta Green Expo is also hoping to work with Habitat for Humanity to build a net-zero, green home which will be available for tours before it is given to a deserving family in the community.

Green Lifestyles:
Being green isn’t just about alternative energy and recycling. It’s about adopting and living a life that is in balance with nature. The Atlanta Green Expo seminars will focus on helping you find products, services and practices which will promote ways in which you and your family can live healthier, happier and more sustainable lives.

Visit the official website for more event details, and don’t forget to spread the word about this interactive, informative and inspiring event! Green Buzz depends upon people like YOU sharing the green news in your community!

For questions about the Atlanta Green Expo, call 904.236.9966 or email info@globalgreenup.com.

eat . live . think green

New Zealand’s New Face Of Environmental Activism

The respectable faces of environmental activism have plucked eyebrows and discreetly applied lip gloss.

Their names are listed at the end of television shows and the start of company reports.

On a rainy Auckland Tuesday, nobody is scaling a coal-fired power station or storming a whaling ship. But they are pushing an environmental message. The rich, the famous, the as-seen-on-Shortland-Street have gathered in a Mt Eden film studio to convince government to act faster against climate change.

Actors Lucy Lawless and Keisha Castle Hughes are here. So is former vodka mogul Geoff Ross, The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall and recently sacked Niwa scientist Jim Salinger. Roll out the green carpet the celebrity activist has something to say.

“There is no Planet B,” says Lawless.

“The science is bloody obvious,” says Salinger.

They take their place in front of a video camera, on the gaffer-taped mark on the floor, and prepare to take Greenpeace where it’s never been before: the middle market.

Over the next seven months, local celebrities will attempt to convince 300,000 Kiwis to sign-on to a call for a 40 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. It’s the biggest and most mainstream public mobilisation the usually radical environmental movement has attempted.

“We believe government does not feel it has a clear mandate to take strong action on climate change,” says Greenpeace. “We need to change this perception.”

In December, world leaders will gather in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate change conference. The Danish government is calling it the “crucial conference” where the aim is global agreement on a plan to reduce the total quantity of greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activity. New Zealand has committed to a 50% reduction on its 1990 emission levels by 2050.

That’s not fast enough, says Greenpeace executive director Bunny McDiarmid.

“Most of the people in government won’t be around in 2050, so they won’t be held accountable. If you’re being a responsible government, what happens in the next 10 years on climate change is going to be what counts.”

McDiarmid was a 28-year-old deckhand when Greenpeace protest ship the Rainbow Warrior en route to protest nuclear weapons testing was bombed in Auckland harbour by French secret service agents

Climate change is, says McDiarmid, “the biggest thing humanity has faced”. Bigger than nuclear bombs?

“As long as we didn’t push that button we were OK. But we have pushed this button already.

“In my 25 years of working in the environmental movement I have never felt so scared and motivated by what is at stake for all of us… this is an issue that will touch every single person’s life, if it hasn’t already.”

McDiarmid says the Greenpeace target is based on work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Implementing a 40% cut in emissions, in a country where half of those emissions come from agriculture, would, she acknowledges, require “a transformation of the way we’re doing our farming”.

Why bother when, as a nation, we contribute to less than half a percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions?

“The world economy is already being affected by climate change. To think our little economy is going to survive and be different because we choose not to participate in these negotiations at the level at which we should…

“We’re all in the same little boat. There is a lot of work going into what the impacts will be for countries like New Zealand, but I would argue we’re probably already seeing them in terms of our droughts, and the cost of those droughts, here and internationally. You’re talking millions and millions of dollars and people’s livelihoods and lives being wiped out, and that has to be weighted against the cost of acting now.”

In March 2008, six Greenpeace climate change activists were arrested when they took to sea to stop a coal ship leaving Lyttelton harbour. In October, four protesters were arrested when they chained themselves to forestry equipment near Tokoroa.

No one was arrested in the making of the new celebrity Sign On campaign. Has Greenpeace gone soft?

“Hopefully we always remain a little unpredictable,” McDiarmid says. “This may be the necessary and unpredictable strand of this campaign.

“The more diverse the Kiwis are who are saying this is important, the better.

“They almost need to be an odd bunch of bedfellows.”

Lucy Lawlessthe Warrior Princess turned eco-Queen gets “one, maybe two” requests a week to endorse products and causes.

“I just can’t get that jazzed about getting a free, I don’t know, washing machine. How do I choose what I support? By my gut and by the integrity of the organisation.”

She says she has inherited a planet that has been rubbished. “I’m pissed at former generations for having been ignorant and stupid and greedy, but it’s our job to start cleaning up.”

Lights. Camera. Action. “Hi, I’m Robyn Malcolm… Cliff Curtis… Peter Gordon… Emily Barclay… Toni Potter…”

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